We’ve bought a new apartment in Köln and are moving. August 4 is the day the moving trucks come.

Drupal has been attracting some really great writers recently, and I have a couple of serious Drupal crushes going at the moment. The first is the blog of Shelley Powers, author of a whole stack of tech books published by O’Reilly. Shelley wrote the first book I ever bought on RDF and has thoroughly documented her initial Drupal experiences. The second is the fantastic site of Sacha Chua whose writing melts my tech heart and gives me the digital butterflies. These two, and many other recent newcomers, have made Planet Drupal very rewarding in the past weeks. And before anyone starts getting jealous about my new blog loves, I promise to still be faithful to my romances of the past (I’m winking flirtatiously at you, Nick Lewis!)

Great job, Dmitri!

Working with Drupal and other open source projects has introduced me to some really brilliant and wonderful people. That's the part of contributing that has been the most worthwhile.

From Connecting the Dots:

If I look at the possibilities, there’s no question that shifting the thinking and perspectives of those in the enterprise is going to be the biggest challenge. Will the enterprise view their web assets — built with social publishing systems — as empowering participants or controlling us? Harvesting our collective intelligence or providing us with value that lets us harvest what the enterprise offers?

It’s great that the idea of Social Publishing is gaining some traction. It comes with a recognition that social tools have changed the way we work, to the extent that a whole new category of web content has emerged. I’m glad that Drupal finds itself right in the middle of this trend.

I have a hard time remembering the name of Handbrake, software that is useful for copying DVDs to your hard drive. The first thing I think of when I try to remember Handbrake’s name is its logo, which is a cocktail glass and a pineapple. I even searched google for “Cocktail Rip DVDs Max OS X” and of course didn’t find what I was looking for. So, as a way of extending my long term memory and making what I know Googleable, here it is: “Handbrake is the best software on Mac OS X for ripping DVDs”.

The excitement and tension in Germany in the final minutes leading up to the big game. Germany and Turkey are special rivals due to the huge Turkish population that lives, sometimes uneasily, within Germany.

According to the Google webmaster tools, RobsHouse.net is a very popular site for a group of people with targeted interests. No, not Drupal. People looking for information on Happy Ending Massages. Why? Because of a short story I found and linked to some time back. Here are the search queries that are drawing the most visitors to my site:

happy ending massage
massage happy ending
massage stories
happy ending massage story
massage story
happy massage

The Wordpress 2.6 Beta 1 is now available. Hats off to the Wordpress team. Here are some features that we should have in Drupal, too:

1. A new and improved image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts: This is interesting and worth checking out. Whoever makes it easy to post images and integrate them into posts will attract massive numbers of users. Drupal lags here.
2. Better SSL support for the Admin: It should be easy for the (non-technical) admin to have either all of a Drupal site or just the admin and login portions go over https.
3. The ability to move wp-config.php out of your web root: This would be settings.php for Drupal and (optionally) moving it out of the webroot is probably a “Good Thing”

There’s still time left for George Bush and his war mongering criminal tribe to initiate another war. Who can stop them?

Unlike the attack on Iraq five years ago, to deal with Iran there need be no massing of troops. And, with the propaganda buildup already well under way, there need be little, if any, forewarning before shock and awe and pox – in the form of air and missile attacks – begin.

This time it will be largely the Air Force’s show, punctuated by missile and air strikes by the Navy. Israeli-American agreement has now been reached at the highest level; the armed forces planners, plotters and pilots are working out the details.

Emerging from a 90-minute White House meeting with President George W. Bush on June 4, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the two leaders were of one mind: